ANIMAL LOVE SPREADS
Valentine’s Day boon for zoos
This year, nothing may say love better than whale snot. Yeah. Really.
But, if you don’t think your beloved will thrill to your passion celebrated by a drone-flying researcher collecting droplet samples from a humpback’s big blow (at a very affordable $22), why not a $14 frog fertility test? A couple of Canadian species are on the brink of extinction, and identifying the biggest and best studs at the Vancouver Aquarium could help bring them back.
Then again, if that all seems a bit too real (and frankly a bit yucky), you can always punctuate your warm, fuzzy feelings for him or her by providing tasty, spiky and live sea urchin as food for the adorable sea otters.
That sea urchin snack could even prove a 10-buck balm to the bereft. If you’re lovelorn, there’s a chance that the aquarium folks might be willing to name the urchin after an ex. It’s that kind of revenge offering from the El Paso zoo in Texas that went viral a few days ago.
The zoo’s offer to sell naming rights to cockroaches that will be fed live and on camera to meerkats on Feb. 14 was quickly oversubscribed. To make sure exes know they are being named and gobbled, the zoo began releasing names on its Facebook page on Monday.
Over in Britain, zookeepers in Sussex hope their ad in the lonely hearts column for Maarten, a colobus monkey, will bear Valentine’s fruit. Maarten is their only animal who hasn’t been “adopted” by some generous sponsor.
So, chocolates, roses and mushy cards? All so last century. After all, what’s Instagrammable about them? Still, it’s hard to imagine what Hallmark makes of the animal love and revenge-by-surrogate, let alone St. Valentine.
As a refresher, Valentine was a third-century Catholic priest who was beheaded, by some accounts, for ministering to Christians in Rome. He is believed by some to have infuriated the emperor by presiding over marriages so that the husbands wouldn’t have to go to war. As a reminder of their vows, St. Valentine is said to have cut hearts out of parchment and given them to the men.
An alternate version is that St. Valentine restored the sight of his jailer’s blind daughter and, before he was beheaded, left a note to her signed, “Your Valentine.”
But if the 21st-century zeitgeist is bizarre to Valentine, it’s also confounding to experts who are very much alive.
A couple of years ago, the media was filled with stories of experts declaring romantic love dead. In December, the Atlantic’s cover story was about how young people are retreating from intimacy, and even from sex.
On the good side, the rate of teen pregnancies in Canada, the United States and most wealthy countries has plummeted over the last two decades. But on the downside, intimacy and relationships are also in decline. The theories about why are myriad, ranging from too much available porn, to too little time, to social alienation due to an obsession with virtual friends. And, of course, some will blame feminists and the #MeToo movement for having taken the fun out of flirting and dating.
Given all of that, maybe roach-crunching meerkats and whale snot are logical outcomes during what the Atlantic dubbed the “sex recession.” Of course, it may also be that people are just waking up after decades of mindless consumerism and deciding to do something good with the money they spend.
Only 51 per cent of Americans are expected to buy Valentine’s gifts this year, down from 63 per cent in 2007. There are no comparable Canadian estimates for either those who plan to give or what they plan to spend. But Americans’ spending is forecast to drop 10 per cent.
While Americans will still pull out their credit cards, Mastercard forecasts jewelry sales will fall by US$1.1 billion. But it also says animals are getting a lot of love. Pet gifts should hit US$886 million this year, up from $367 million a decade ago.
So, the zoos, aquariums and pet stores seem to be on to something. Maybe these days — more than ever — it seems easier to love an animal than a human. And in these days of virtual friends and experiences, the easiest way to do that is showing some animal love to the orphaned, endangered and near-extinct because you’ll never even have to visit them, let alone clean up after them or pay the vet bills.